Patrick French seems to have put into words that spiritual and emotional essence which I identify with Middle Earth and Arda... with the Shadow Realm, with the lands of the Dea al Mon, and countless others.....
'I began to read about Tibet, its life, religion and traditions, its rulers and ruled. Looking back through sheared, overlapping memories, trying to get a glimpse of the past, it is hard to see what made me feel such an instinctive devotion to Tibet.
I can see another version of myself responding, with similar instincts but different knowledge. In essence, there were two things that drew me: the place and the spirit.
Tibet was as far as you could go. It was a harsh, remote, untouched land, outside time and geography, where ideas could be projected and dreams could be lived, a high plateau the size of western Europe, the most mountainous country on earth and nearly the most sparsely populated, a place of physical angularity and limitless expansion where perceptions of space and distance altered, a land of blue sheep, blood pheasants and barking deer, ringed by snow peaks and impassable high-altitude deserts dropping to fields of jasmine, sky-blue poppies, apricot orchards, incandescent turquoise lakes and hillsides of juniper; a place of serenity, where the enlightened chose to return after death and reincarnate themselves in human form for the good of all sentient beings; of names that rolled from your mouth: Pandatsang, Chomolungma, Dekyilingka, Dorje; of ancient monasteries with smoking butter lamps, wrathful deities, prostrating nuns, flailing oracles, revelatory trances and shaven-headed incarnations in maroon robes, cloistered in meditation, the low cry of human thigh-bone trumpets and the rhythm of soft, gutteral chanting flowing down the valleys with the snow-melt; nomads and herders, amulets close to the skin, children wrapped in sheep-skins, pushing flocks of yak and dzo, the yak-cow crossbreed, through the mountain passes, heading for the fragrant grasslands as their ancestors had always done. This was Tibet, before I went there: a place of dreams, a place to feel at home.'
Translated into a Rajasthani dialect and portrayed as a folk tale, Erendira is based on Marquez's story of a fourteen-year-old girl who accidentally sets fire to her grandmother’s (dadi-sa) palace of a household and then has to spend the rest of her life as a roving prostitute, raising money to make good the damage, is captivating, scintillating and deeply moving as well. The girl gains in popularity and the grandmother makes money, until, perhaps inevitably, Erendira falls in love with Ulysses (Ullasi), a truck driver and induces him to slay the woman who has forced her into a life of prostitution. A bizarre fairytale plays out, marrying epic tragedy with contemporary culture. It’s remarkable fluidity in the progression of the narrative and the precision with which the actors morph into different characters as well as swap roles, is superlative.
Five actors together representing the grandmother sprawled out in her bathtub, indeed, look much like the huge white whale that Marquez describe her as. Six women play the role of the innocent girl who gives up her body every night to strangers for a price. Five women and a young man play Grandmother, in each of her grotesque avatars. All of them wear pancake make-up, the sort that Kabuki-dancers sport, to give the play overtones of a puppet show. A spectacle that combined elements of fantasy, fairy tale, foot-tapping music (a heady mix of the Colombian carnivalesque and Rajasthani folk beats), lively dancing (Flamenco, Kalaripayattu, folk dances) and plenty of razzle-dazzle. The costumes, the stage décor and the props have a lot of gold in them - to signify opulence, aridity, claustrophobia, riches, money (an obvious spill-over of the image of the Grandmother’s gold vest — the only thing that Erendira takes with her before leaving after the old harridan had been slain). Another interesting touch is in the pairs of trousers, hanging in a row from a clothesline, later joined by a series of deflated balloons in the shape of human bodies. Phenomenal choice of music and choreography made it an evening and a play to remember.
